Review: 'Half of a Yellow Sun' ★★★

Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton star in the absorbing historical drama Half of a Yellow Sun, now at Siskel

Better than average historical fiction, "Half of a Yellow Sun" (now in a week's run at the Siskel Film Center) takes its cruelly hopeful title from the flag of Biafra depicting the upper half of a rising sun against bold stripes of red, black and green. Biafra was its own secessionist republic from 1967 to 1970, breaking away from the endlessly fracturing and reforming Nigerian government. Some 30,000 died in the civil war during those years, and against this swirl of political history novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie set her 2006 book, lately adapted and directed for the screen by Biyi Bandele.

It's worth seeing, not because the story dramatizes recent, wrenching history in absorbing fashion (though it does that), but because it works as character-driven narrative. It's good to see Thandie Newton, in particular, stretch out and exercise her acting muscles after so many pinched and limiting roles. Newton and Anika Noni Rose play Olanna and Kainene, daughters of a prosperous Nigerian businessman. Kainene takes over a healthy portion of the family business; Olanna, meantime, takes a job teaching sociology.

Her lover, known to all, sneeringly, as "the revolutionary," is a fellow academic played by Ejiofor. They're excellent together; the director allows Ejiofor and Newton to establish a base-line of on-screen rapport and intimacy, which is crucial, because the events of "Half of a Yellow Sun" test these two over and over.

There's a soapy element to the plotting. Ejiofor's character fathers a child with the provincial servant of his fearsome mother. His mother regards Olanna as nothing more than "an educated witch." Kainene's lover is an Englishman abroad (Joseph Mawle), and in an act of revenge sex, Olanna falls into a wine-fueled fling with her sister's partner.

There are times in "Half of a Yellow Sun" when you feel the compression of events and coups and cyclical refugee relocations in an unhelpful way. The coda more or less throw its hands up, noting what becomes of the characters in routine shorthand. But the best of the movie finds a way to abridge the novel and still allow the scenes to breathe. The bloody chaos is staged and filmed with urgent effectiveness. "No longer a country in colonial subjugation!" the unseen newsreel narrator trumpets in the opening archival clip, ushering in the 1960s and Nigeria's independence. What came next was pretty awful, yet some survived, and without feeling like hokey cases of exceptionalism, the characters of Adichie's novel and Bandele's film reward our attention, no little thanks to Newton and Ejiofor.